Arabic Linguistics, Department of Languages, Literatures & Cultures
2010 Rothman Faculty Summer Fellowship
Over the summer of 2010, Dr. Youssef Haddad revised and completed a book on comparative syntax with the support of the Rothman Faculty Summer Fellowship. Dr. Haddad is interested in the syntax structure of various languages, and has been working on the sentence structure of South Asian languages, such as Assamese, a language of north eastern India. His goal is to gain broader insight into Adjunct Control, the principle of how two subjects, in different parts of the same sentence, the matrix clause and the subordinate clause, reference one another. In the past, linguists have looked to English, French, German, and other common western languages to understand Adjunct Control, and assumed that all language operated in a way similar to English. Dr. Haddad decided to study this linguistic phenomenon in other languages, such as those from the Indian Subcontinent. Though Assamese is part of the Indo-European language family, that is, the same language family as English and most other European languages, it operates in different ways in regard to Adjunct Control. What is unique about Assamese is that the subject of the sentence may be pronounced in either the matrix or the subordinate clause, in neither, or in both. This is in sharp distinction to the rules that linguistics had previously believed to be universal. The patterns of Assamese have never been investigated in such detail before, and Dr. Haddad’s book will be the first to deal with Assamese generative syntax. By spending his summer concluding his research and revising and copy-editing his manuscript, he was able to get his work published as a book by Mouton de Gruyter Press. The book is titled Control into Conjunctive Participle Clauses: The Case of Assamese. His next project is to apply the work he has done toward studying similar syntactic structures outside the Indo-European language family. He has already done similar work related to Arabic (Standard and dialects), and he plans to do more in the future.